1. Field of the Invention
The present embodiments relate to methods for providing news, and more particularly, methods, systems, and computer programs for providing a customized news stream to a user.
2. Description of the Related Art
The Internet has witnessed an explosive growth of online news. According to a recent report, more than 123 million people visited news websites such as Yahoo!™ News in May 2010, representing 57 percent of the total U.S. internet audience, with each visitor reading 43 pages on average. These numbers have been steadily increasing over the past years and show the growing appeal of reading news online.
Different people like different types of news content. In order to provide a better news-reading experience, some news websites recommend different types of media to users based on past behavior. Personalized news deliver a news stream to a user, according to the desires and use trends of the user. However, customizing the news stream is a complex problem because the number of news sources and the multiple types of available media continue to grow rapidly.
Recommending interesting news articles to users has become extremely important for internet news providers looking to maintain users' interest. While existing Web services, such as search providers, attract users' initial clicks, ways to engage users after their initial visit are largely under explored.
To provide custom news, some previous approaches have used article-click rates to measure the quality of news items, and the best news items are provided to users based on the clicked rates. However, click-based information does not provide an accurate measurement of article quality. For example, some articles that are presented on the top of the stream may receive more clicks but not have a high intrinsic quality value.
In search algorithms, click-through rates have proven valuable to identify webpages that tend to provide the best results for a given query. However, the same principle does not apply to news, as each user may prefer to view different set of news, and what might be top priority for a user may not be of interest to another user.
It is in this context that embodiments arise.